


So that's a thing.

by Scappodaqui



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: "Who the hell is Buffy?", Angst and Humor, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Civilian Casualties in War, Dan Savage sex advice column, F/M, Gen, Humor, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, M/M, Mood Whiplash, More like Age of Ultron with added Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Multi-POV, Open Relationships, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Misunderstanding of Racial Terms, Period-Typical Racism, Riley is dead just mentioning him, Sam POV, Soul-Searching, Steve POV, War in Afghanistan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 03:08:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3794404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America: Winter Soldier if Steve's apparent flirtation with Sam had been actual flirtation:</p><p>  <i>“Your bed, it’s too soft. When I was over there I’d sleep on the ground, use rocks for a pillow, like a cave man. Now I’m home, lying in my bed, and it’s like--”</i></p><p>  <i>“Actually, mine’s pretty hard.”</i></p><p> Captain America turns out to have a little bit of game. They'll wind up talking about Sam's old partner. Turns out his last name is Finn. This is somehow a crossover with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but not a crackfic.  I don't know how that happened. Partly retracing the events in Winter Soldier.</p><p>This fic is on INDEFINITE HIATUS.  Let me admit this was one of my first fanfic attempts.  Read at own risk.  There are some cute bits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Actually, Mine's Pretty Hard

**Author's Note:**

> I never thought I would find myself writing Captain America/Buffy The Vampire Slayer crossover fic, but hang on a second. Let me explain. What if Sam’s old dead army buddy were Riley Finn from Buffy? Because Steve fought Nazi vampires, at least in the comics. _That’s a thing._
> 
> I don’t know how much of a crossover this will really be, but Buffy’s going to get at least a mention at some point.
> 
> I also think many of us here in the fandom are frustrated that Sam and Steve’s blatantly flirtatious meet-cute at the beginning of CA:WS is not acknowledged as such in canon. So I fixed it. Once again, thanks to Lena7412 for canon help. Concrit from anyone else re: canonicity and characterization welcome.

“It’s your bed, right?”

“What’s that?” 

“Your bed, it’s too soft. When I was over there I’d sleep on the ground, use rocks for a pillow, like a cave man. Now I’m home, lying in my bed, and it’s like--”

“Actually, mine’s pretty hard.”

There was a long pause. Steve shifted his weight and watched Sam’s forehead crinkle, then relax. His eyebrows went up. _Why did you say that?_ This was not St. George’s, for God’s sake. It was the middle of the day on the Washington Mall. But it had that rhythm, it had seemed like the right moment… Sam looked at him more closely than people usually looked at Captain America, and it had been, what, roughly seventy years since someone had razzed him like that? But was he so used to speaking in code that he’d completely misread the situation?

Sam stood up, bracing one hand against the tree. He winced, but probably from the exertion of the run--he was sweaty, but smiling. Warily. Looking a little confused. Yeah, because _Captain America just came onto him._

“Lemme give you my number,” Sam said.

“Oh!” Steve pulled out his notebook. “Sure, yeah, here.” (A memory struck: standing by the track where Bucky practiced, the sketchbook in his hand damp where Bucky had thumbed through the action poses Steve had captured. That was where he’d learned to love the poetry of bodies in motion, running.)

“Still a pen-and-paper kinda guy, huh?” Sam said absently, scribbling. Steve alternated between looking down at him and off to the side in a studiedly disinterested way, lest their breath mixing in the small space between their bent heads get too close. 

“Use it to keep track of everything people tell me I’ve missed,” Steve said, finally taking a short step closer. After checking to be sure Sam had finished writing in his number and full name, he took the pad--thumb brushing Sam’s palm--and flipped back. “ _I Love Lucy_ … the moon landing… Thai food.”

“I know a good place for that.” Sam, to his credit, played it pretty low-key, still smiling down at the list. His eyes flicked up toward Steve’s. “Hey. Marvin Gaye, 1972, Trouble Man soundtrack. Pretty much sums up the twentieth century.”

“I’ll write it down.” Steve’s phone buzzed, and he pulled it out. Natasha. Of those with whom he regularly communicated, only she and Tony Stark signed their texts with the scramble of colon and parenthesis he’d learned symbolized a smiling face. Stark’s occasionally employed brackets as an ersatz mustache and the ‘>’ to represent his beard.

“Okay, duty calls.” He started to back away, but slowly, an ambling kind of shuffle that told him for once he’d really rather not leave. 

“Hey, fellas.” At the sound of Natasha’s voice he almost jumped, like he’d been caught out. Still an automatic response. “Either of you know where the Smithsonian is? I’m here to pick up a fossil.”

“That’s hilarious.”

“How you doin’?” Was Sam trying to cover for them, too? Was it like that? Bucky had been the master of that sort of bait-and-switch flirtation.

“Can’t run everywhere.”

“No... you... can’t.” The way Sam watched him leave, head tilted back and a smile playing across his face… he knew that look.

\----------------------------------------------

In the car on the way to SHIELD headquarters, he pulled out his pad to input Sam’s number to his phone. Who knew if he’d have time after the mission? He multitasked, listening as Natasha filled in the details of what they’d have to deal with. Twenty-five mercenaries… Batroc…. hostages, more information on the layout when they got to SHIELD. When he tucked away his phone, she narrowed her eyes at him sideways. 

“So I can stop bugging you about Kristin from accounting?”

“Huh?” 

“A date, Rogers. You found a date.”

“Oh.” Steve rubbed at the back of his neck and stared out the window, elbow on the sill. He could feel himself turning a little red. “I don’t know if I’d call it that.”

“Well, why did he give you his number?”

“He knows a good Thai place.” Steve’s shoulders slumped. It had been easier when he knew how things stood. Back in Brooklyn--wait, back in the ‘30s--a ‘date’ wasn’t something you did with a man. Cruising a sailor did not end in the exchange of phone numbers. Occasionally, it ended in you getting beat up and robbed. He knew it wasn’t like that anymore, but he didn’t know precisely what it _was_ like.

“Huh.” Natasha nodded definitively, her body language relaxed and thoughtful even as she fishtailed the car around a corner at blazing speed. You came to expect that kind of dichotomy with Natasha. “Great. Now I don’t have to worry about setting you up.”

“You never actually did have to--”

“So let’s talk about the next step. Dinner date is good. You should feed him off your plate. Builds trust. He’ll know you aren’t trying to poison him.” 

Something told him Natasha might not be the one to ask about current social mores, of any kind.

“Lots of eye contact is also good.”

“Uh-huh.” Pointedly, Steve kept staring out the window. But what he was thinking about (along with the possibility, thanks to Natasha, that Sam Wilson might be an enemy spy), was the way Sam _had_ made eye contact, open and relaxed. He thought he’d like to draw the way Sam had stared after them when the car pulled away from the curb, the lines of his body loose and strong. 

“Don’t worry. I’ll run a background check for you. Wilson, right?”

“Yeah, he works at the VA.”

“Really.”

\----------------------------------------------

“So are you going to call him?”

“Little busy here!” Diving off the side of the plane into dark water made that an understatement. He’d never stop feeling like Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan when he took long dives, though.

Later: “Because you don’t just call someone, you know. Text message first. Less intrusive. Status?” Steve heard gunshots in the background. _Hurk. Snap._ Natasha was great at multitasking.

(At first, Steve had found it a little strange that you had this thing. Called a phone. And you mostly used it for things other than telephoning people. Admittedly, the internet-browsing capability came in handy, as did street directions. He could even track his running paces and heart rate on the thing. At first, he’d thought the SHIELD ‘phone’ he’d been issued was unique in its capabilities--special, like a spy pen that could turn into a radio or stiletto blade. But no. All phones were like that. 

He was _fairly_ sure not everyone’s phone had the capability to emit a sonic pulse like Natasha’s did. “It fries the speakers, though,” she’d explained, shrugging.)

Turned out Natasha had a lot going on that no one bothered to tell Steve about. 

His confrontation with Fury after the mission erased any good feeling he’d had earlier in the day. He’d begun to worry about the future. (No, not the future, the present). Steve was aware that he had complicated and specific feelings about privacy, but was convinced this didn’t bias him. Those in charge did not always have people’s best interests at heart. Privacy, the gap between rule and implementation, acted a failsafe in the cases in which the law didn’t actually serve justice. Nick Fury ought to understand that--heck, Steve remembered when technicalities of law meant he shouldn’t’ve have been able to serve next to Jones and Morita, but Command had looked the other way. And he wouldn’t be Captain America in the first place if they hadn’t looked the other way when he’d gone AWOL in ‘43 to rescue Bucky.

Looking the other way meant you could obey the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. Project Insight--digitization, maybe that was it--maybe that was what meant far too much was now spelled out in unyielding letters. Too many damn acronyms that made you forget what the letters stood for.

So yeah. He had some mixed feelings about SHIELD.

After the meeting, he took a long shower back in his apartment and watched dawn break over the flat square streets of Washington. The city’s rigid grid layout gave him an uneasy feeling, next to his memories of Brooklyn--kind of glaring, exposed. He texted Natasha before his hair even had a chance to dry: 

No background check. Leave it.

And then, even though it was early, Sam:

Hello. Steve Rogers here. You free?

To his surprise, his phone rang almost immediately.

“Hey there.” Sam’s voice, same as he remembered, low and measured. None of the insincere vibrato some people got talking to Captain! America! Thank God.

Steve wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder and took a seat at his drafting table, one foot braced on the rung of his chair, cup of coffee in hand. He didn’t need much sleep, but the long night seemed to be catching up with him anyway. There was a deep sandy ache behind his eyes. “I catch you before your run?”

“Man, you could give me an hour’s head start and you’d still catch me.” Sam chuckled.

Steve blew out his breath, shutting his eyes for a minute. “Maybe you kinda want to get caught.”

A pause. “So,” Sam said, in a more businesslike way. There was a muffled noise in the background, which to Steve’s enhanced hearing sounded like a frying pan hitting a stove burner. He imagined the easy, careless gestures on the other end of the line: frying pan, spatula, the creak of a refrigerator door. “So,” once again, “you on the down low, then, Captain?”

“Hey, I get that reference.” 

“Yeah?” 

Steve sighed, rubbed his eyes. “I guess I am.”

“I’ve been there. Joined up when we still had Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Is that one of the things you’re gonna have to look up? Figured they’d have told you.”

“I got briefed. It’s pretty new, isn’t it?”

Sam made a soft, ironic noise in the back of his throat. “You’d’a thought, in seventy-odd years, right?”

Steve couldn’t think of a thing to say. “I’m still catching up on a lot. Still want to try that Thai place.”

The sound of slow breathing. “Well, sure. I’m off at five, but I could skip out at lunchtime, too. Don’t take orders from nobody no more.” 

Steve almost laughed, but it came out a snort. “Sounds nice.”

“If you do come by we’re having a group, ya know, at four.”

“Maybe I will.”

“If duty doesn’t call again, huh?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Think you’d like it, Steve, if you do come by. Okay to call you Steve?”

“Sure, Sam.”

“See you later, Steve.”


	2. The Down Low

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Steve get Thai food (of course). Steve talks more than he has in years. The meaning of a lot of words has changed. I should warn that Steve comes from the 1940s and some of his concepts of language are therefore outdated.

Steve got to sleep after that, and woke up hungry around two o’clock. Not the kind of shaky low blood sugar he remembered from when he’d been diabetic, but empty enough that he went through half a loaf of bread with peanut butter and lousy bananas before he remembered he’d better leave room for Thai food.

He went to the meeting. Afterwards, he and Sam met in the hallway, hands in pockets, aware of the flow of vets streaming out around them; but these people were circumspect. They didn’t stop and gawk. After awhile they were alone in the hall and Sam started talking about Riley, almost like it was something he’d been planning to do. Maybe he had, but it still felt real, and far too close to home.

“--Just kept going over and over in my head, if I’d done this, if I’d been just a little faster. But I couldn’t think of anything I could’ve… I just couldn’t…..”

It occurred to Steve that Sam already knew _his_ story and clearly saw the parallel. “I know what you mean,” he said.

“After that, I couldn’t stop wondering what I was even doing over there anymore, you know? So I just--” He shrugged. “I got out.” Looked at Steve for awhile, head tilted to one side. 

Getting out wasn’t really an option for Captain America. He more or less shrugged off Sam’s suggestion that he could do whatever he wanted as impractically idealistic. At the same time--hey, wasn’t he usually the impractically idealistic one? Maybe he’d think more about that.

On the walk to the restaurant, Sam assured him that this was the kind of dive where no one got recognized, not even U.S. Senators and Congressional pages. (“Don’t even bother looking that one up.”) They got to talk about different things, shaking off the heavy stuff from the meeting. They decided Steve had to try Pad Thai for sure, and talked about finding another running route. They walked far enough apart that no one watching would think anything of it, a precaution that came naturally, it seemed, to them both. For Steve, the purposeful distance created a friction not unlike intimacy. He wondered if that were true for Sam, but couldn’t figure out a way to ask.

“It wasn’t like that with Riley, by the way,” Sam commented quietly, once they had settled into their booth at the restaurant. They’d been placed behind a bamboo screen painted with pandas and fancifully curlicued trees. “He had a thing for skinny blonde chicks, so basically the polar opposite of me. Geez, the stories I had to listen to about his ex… but we were tight.”

“Uh, okay.”

“I mean, I got _stories_.” He looked up at Steve. “You’re being kinda quiet, you okay?”

Steve let his shoulders relax and gave a half-smile. “You know, actually? Why I’m quiet? It’s the slang--it’s different now. I don’t wanna say the wrong thing sometimes. Believe it or not, I used to have something of a mouth on me…..”

“You sound fine to me. Even knew about ‘on the down low’, and I thought that was just for brothas.” A blink. “Brothas--black guys. Guess a white guy wouldn’t use that term, though it’s not awful or anything.”

“No, it’s,” His ears were turning red. “Other mistakes. Terms that are obsolete. A couple months ago I... screwed up... and an agent backing me up got his arm broken. So I told the director I’d really pulled a boner, and he…” Steve vividly remembered the way Nick Fury’s eyebrow had lowered spectacularly over his single eye, the way his mouth had made a terrifying ‘o’. He had been highly, highly skeptical when Steve had explained he’d meant no disrespect and actually did not know why Director Fury would believe he had, sir, thank you, sir, if you could please explain.

Now _Sam_ was making a face, covering his mouth with one hand. Now he was biting at the back of his hand. Now he was shaking his head and breathing in through his nose helplessly in tiny snorts.

“You’re laughing at me.”

“Yes, yes I am. I am right now imagining Captain America saying ‘boner’ to a superior officer, so excuse me just a second.” He held up a finger and doubled over to one side of the table. “Just one sec.” Silent convulsions of laughter, and then, taking a deep breath, he surfaced for air, palms flat on the table. Squared his shoulders. “Go on.” His mouth twitched. “No wait. Okay, go on.”

“Yeah, well, after that, I had to go through sensitivity training. A lot of it was great, actually. Most of those words we’re not supposed to say, well, I wouldn’t use ‘em anyway… but I still don’t want to get something wrong. But… a lot’s changed.”

“Like what?” It must have come from being a counselor--Sam, having composed himself in the wake of his laughing fit, was apparently a master of the nonjudgmental, open-ended question. 

“Well, I knew ‘on the down low,’ but it was more about the women, back then. Not.” He gestured at Sam. “And ‘dick’ could just be a _detective_. I guess a lot of words that were innocent then aren’t, anymore. But some things went the other way, things that had other meanings got forgotten, I guess.” He thought about it. “Punk. Punk is… a type of music now?”

“Yeah, and a whole countercultural movement deal in the ‘90s. Can’t think of anything else it means, off the top of my head.”

“Well, it used to be…”

_In sensitivity training Steve had learned about the concept of ‘reappropriation.’ How blacks could say ‘n---’, as a way of taking the sting out of it. How queer people could say ‘queer’ like they owned it and make it okay. And he had understood that almost immediately, because that was what had happened with Bucky and the word ‘punk.’_

_Back then, before the war, he hadn’t known Bucky ever had any leanings in that direction himself, but he had found Steve walking out with Charlie Thompson a few too many times. Saved them from a beating a few too many times, too. And one day, half-carrying Steve home, he’d said, “Geez. You're such a punk.” In a long-suffering, sighing kind of a way, almost a murmur._

_“Jerk!” Genuinely stung, breathless with anger, Steve had tried to pull away, staggering to one side. Bucky caught his elbow._

_“Sh. Sh.” Shushed him, slung an arm around his neck, shaking him. “You_ are _a punk.” Ruffled his hair. “So what? Let’s go home.”_

 _It didn’t always mean_ that _, could mean other things, but in this case it meant Bucky knew, and accepted it. He had accepted it less in himself, but Steve didn’t see that until later--how Bucky cared about following the rules and Steve, in some greater sense, did not. How Bucky was afraid. And he’d sometimes wondered if the desperate way Bucky turned to him during the war was… was genuine? Was honest. He wondered why he’d only wanted Steve after Erskine’s serum, though fearing his desire was superficial was the least of it._

_A lot about Bucky was different by then._

_Steve had even wondered, in the weeks he’d had to churn it over in his mind, if Bucky, increasingly withdrawn and cynical about the war, had started things when he did because he_ wanted _a blue ticket and thought maybe that was the way he could save them both.  
_

“... Used to mean something else,” Steve finished, distantly.

Sam watched him, levelly, then reached out and covered Steve’s fingers, which sat twitching on the table next to his napkin, with his own. 

“Man. You don’t gotta tell me anything you don’t want.” 

“It’s just a long story and.” Steve looked down and flexed his fingers under Sam’s, then released them. “We should order.”

“Feel that,” Sam said, slowly withdrawing his hand, flipping open his menu. Not looking offended, just watchful, cautious. 

Pad Thai turned out to be pretty good. It reminded Steve a little bit of chop suey, which they had back in New York in his day for cheap. But the peanuts were different, the noodles stringy and difficult to navigate, the spiciness a novelty. Filling, too. It was definitely a stick-to-your-ribs kind of food.

“Someone I work with told me I ought to feed you off my plate,” Steve said, more comfortable after he’d finished about half his dish. “Apparently that’ll convince you I’m not trying to poison you.”

Sam was giving him that look, which he had begun to be able to recognize. It was a you’re-crazy-but-I’ll-go-with-it look, a comfortable-as-an-old-couch look, somehow, even though they’d just met. “ _Are_ you trying to poison me?”

“Of course not. I’m Captain America.” He crimped up one corner of his mouth.

“Okay then, Captain, I’ll bite. Shrimp.” He pointed, leaned forward, and opened his mouth. Steve carefully navigated his fork in that direction, feeling hot under the collar… hot everywhere, as a matter of fact. Pressure on his fork as Sam bit down, chewed slowly, and even more slowly swallowed.

“Good?”

“Oh… yeah.” They locked eyes. Steve’s throat felt dry. He had to put down his fork.

But his heart jumped, and he couldn’t stop himself craning to one side to look around the corner of the bamboo screen, just to be sure no one was watching. When he looked back, he realized at least one person was. Sam still had his eyes on him. Patiently. 

“Reminds me,” Steve said, his voice a little hoarse. He coughed--it tasted like peanuts. “One thing we did have ‘back in the day’--‘back in the day’, right?” Sam nodded. “M &M’s. We had M&M’s, while we were on the front. That’s when they’d just started making them.”

“Think I remember reading something about that. We got ‘em too, in Afghanistan. You’d think they wouldn’t melt, but sometimes they did, right in the bag, big ol’ clump.” 

“Back then they came in tubes. Like ammo. Morita always just poured his straight down his throat, which was funny to watch. He’d have cheeks like a chipmunk. Rest of us would throw them at each other and catch them in our mouths, Bucky said it’s how he kept his aim so sharp.” Bucky had also always kept extra M&M’s left over, remembering Steve’s diabetic days before the serum, when he’d always had a bit of candy in a pocket in case Steve got dizzy. “Uh, anyway, you know what was so neat? I could see the colors. Before Erskine’s serum I could basically make out red, white, and blue…”

“Patriotic of you.”

“Seriously.” Steve shook his head. “But that was it. I still don’t even draw much in color, not used to it.” _Oh, shit. Was he going to take that as some sort of comment on race? Shit._

“So you really don’t see color.” Okay, not offended, but something. 

“Uh, I mean, obviously…”

“It’s okay, Steve. I get it, you like chocolate.”

“You giving me a hard time?” He actually smiled.

“Maybe a little, Mr. ‘on your left.’”

It occurred to Steve that he hadn’t exchanged this many words with a single person, outside of maybe his initial debriefings, since he’d been unfrozen. It also occurred to him that he’d been blabbing on about himself--to Sam, who really did know how to listen, had that perfect rippleless calm to him that made you feel like you could drop your thoughts in like stones. But Sam already knew more about him--well, more half-truths and myths, anyway, from the exhibits and books and articles--than Steve knew about him. 

So he asked questions while they finished eating. Learned that Sam had wanted to be a vet (“veterinarian, not the kind I wound up as”) when he was a kid but didn’t like watching animals in pain, so he preferred counseling. That his mother had served in the Air Force. He played guitar, poorly. There “were some girls, I think it’s a continuum, but relationships, mostly just guys.” (Steve nodded). He liked to read Terry Pratchett books (“put that on the list”) and watch cheesy kung-fu moves (“put Bruce Lee on the list”). Was more of a basketball fan than baseball, but he’d go to a game.

They went to Sam’s place. It seemed like the right thing to do. 

Sam asked him a lot if he was ‘okay with this,’ but listened when he said he was, yes, he was sure. And when they got there he shut the door and Steve put his hands on his neck and looked at him forehead to forehead, breathing hard and hot. It was a nice apartment, smelled of lemon Pledge and very faintly of laundry soap, and Steve noticed nothing but a blur of it. They kissed. Sam tasted like green tea and health, Steve wasn’t used to that, the cleanness, the taste like a swimming pool. They’d been on the march so much before the train that Bucky had always--

They stayed very quiet except for their breath, fumbling under each other’s shirts, undoing their belts, not even leaving the foyer but just pressing up against the wall in the dark. Steve’s hand smacked at the wall next to Sam’s head. They grappled. The rubber of Sam’s shoes slid out from the wall across the polished-shiny floor, scrabbling for balance, and they made an ungraceful descent into a heap on the hard ground and it was all fast and blind and clumsy and it had been _two years_ without this kind of, just touch, _anything_ , someone’s hands on him, his hands on someone else.

Afterwards, sprawled next to him on the floor and pinned down by one arm and one leg, Sam whispered, “This definitely isn’t too soft.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Help, I seem to have gotten angst in my crackfic. No--I’ve gotten crackfic in my angst! Hey… maybe we’re onto something here. (Credit: Reese’s commercials.) In all seriousness, the rationale behind this chapter, after consultation with Lena7412, is as follows: Steve is really lonely and, let’s be honest, probably pretty starved for sexual contact. Sam is really awesome. Steve is really angsty about Bucky, have you noticed? And Steve doesn’t mention Bucky to Sam out of respect for his privacy, even though he’s presumed dead--maybe _especially_ because he’s (presumed) dead, since he can’t speak for himself. What can I say, I’m a fan of subtext and characters who don't say everything they're thinking. 
> 
> Think of this, for now, less as a crossover and more as Captain America garnished with occasional Easter Egg mentions of Buffy. More details on Riley will unfold. I promise Nazi vampires _will_ get a shoutout. It’s going to stay more in Captain America-verse, though, at least through the plot of CA:WS.
> 
> Comments much appreciated.


	3. The Campsite Rule

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Sam POV chapter!**
> 
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> That chapter in which absolutely nothing happens except: Steve and Sam talk about sex, your friendly neighborhood author fades out on them actually having sex, and Dan Savage goes on The List. 
> 
> Again, this chapter is from Sam's POV apart from the coda at the very end, which is purely narration for the purpose of moving the plot along.

Steve became much less awkward once they’d stopped talking and gotten down to, well, getting down. Apparently they called it an ‘old-fashioned’ for a reason: guys from the 1930s gave really good head.

There had been, no getting around it, a kind of tortured intensity to the hookup, a kind Sam thought he might be familiar with himself. It was the kind of intensity you got when you were used to thinking every day that you were maybe about to die. Sam had briefly considered the Campsite Rule and whether or not he should really be doing this with a guy who clearly needed help on a level beyond a one-night stand. But on the other hand, treating this as a normal date was probably the right thing to do; finding out what you wanted was half of coming home. Steve was definitely finding out what he wanted. He definitely _wanted_. 

It turned out the floor was, Sam had to admit, a little harder than ideal for someone who didn’t have supersoldier enhancements and, possibly, access to highly classified chiropractic services. Groaning--had he thrown out his back?--he gently extracted himself from under Steve’s arm and hitched himself up against the wall. Steve followed, leaning against his shoulder like he was used to that position, though he had to shift himself down a little so they lined up right. He looked calmer now than he had at the restaurant. Like he was more used to this. Which he probably was, it occurred to Sam--going out to a restaurant with a guy was probably more foreign to someone from the 1930s than fucking in a hallway.

“You need a medic?” Steve said, with a sideways smile, breaking what Sam had feared was becoming some sort of potential tension. But no, actually, Steve seemed _fine_. Apparently banter suited him better than post-coital cuddling, good to know. 

He was still tactile, though, sliding his hand up in the space between them to rub at Sam’s neck. Sam sighed in acknowledgment let his head drop forward--that felt good.

“You’re doing pretty good on your own,” he said. “Actually, what I want to know is how a guy from the ‘30s knew to ask ‘top or bottom.’” (What he had said in the moment, much to Steve’s apparent relief, was ‘let’s go for that deal later’). “Like. Seriously. Are you trolling with your supposed lack of cultural knowledge or--”

“I had to _research_ that,” Steve said. “And apparently I was wrong anyway.” He shrugged, settling back, muscles flexing against Sam’s side.

“Not wrong, no, a lot of dudes dig that paradigm, it’s just not the be-all and end-all of, uh, you know. Wait a minute. Research? Was it on your _list_?”

“Sort of.” Sam would’ve put money on the likelihood Steve was blushing. His shoulders had started to creep upward. “One of my teammates, ah, told me I ought to see some films about Captain America. You know there are a _lot_ of--” He stopped. 

“Oh, Lord,” Sam said. “The porn? Yeah.” Part of him actually imagined it might have been awful for Steve to see that--couldn’t imagine if some parodic version of himself had been splashed all over pornhub while he was picking his way out of his own closet. “I apologize on behalf of the intervening generations for that.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I like porn in general,” said Captain _fucking_ America. “There are so many kinds now, with the internet.”

Sam jolted into a laugh. 

“No, hey, I learned a lot, plus it’s not like I could just go out and…”

“Uh, excuse me.”

“You have any idea how long it took me to get up the courage to--” Steve shook his head, reaching out to run his knuckles over Sam’s cheekbone and jaw. _Damn_. 

“You know,” Sam said, once they had reached a pause in the kissing wherein one might begin to attempt a transition to further activities, “They make Captain America condoms. I don’t have any, because that would be creepy, but I thought you should know that’s a thing.”

“Do I know,” Steve said, not missing a beat (damn, he was like a different person). “I have those plus the Iron Man ones.”

 

They recommenced the discussion of porn forty minutes later, now in Sam’s bed. Steve had not been lying about the condoms. He had, however, refused to actually use the Iron Man ones.

“Dan Savage,” Sam said. “Put that on the list, Savage Love, sex advice column. It will explain the title of ‘Pegging Captain America,’ if you actually decide you want to know.”

“I, uh, maybe don’t.”

Steve had volunteered a little about Peggy at the restaurant, but the details were just too heartbreaking and he clearly did not want to talk about it. Losing someone was bad enough, but losing them bit by bit right in front of you was some cold shit. He had seen people go through it at the VA in various contexts; not always Alzheimer’s, either. Traumatic brain injury, addiction, there was never an easy way to grieve someone who was still alive.

So they talked about other things. Because this wasn’t therapy--it was actually one of the most enjoyable dates (hookups, things) he’d had in recent memory. Definitely one of the more surreal. Especially because Sam would’ve bet money that Steve was on his way out of the apartment after that first heated fumble against the wall, not that he’d be comfortable to stick around and share stories like a couple of… old friends? A couple of… a couple?…. right. Because that was it, wasn’t it? That was what Steve was probably used to.

They even talked about Sam’s tours in Afghanistan. Sam showed Steve an old picture he had of himself and Riley.

“It’s only fair,” he said, “you have a whole Smithsonian exhibit.”

“You been?”

“You bet your ass,” Sam said.

Man, Sam was a freaking magnet for white boys with supersoldier serum issues. He remembered what Riley had told him about Professor Walsh’s experiments back before he’d decided on pararescue as a form of atonement; the way he’d felt like he couldn’t be good enough. That seemed _familiar_. But no. No way was Steve Rogers his stand-in for Riley Finn. He was not going to contemplate that. 

Steve did take a pretty long look at Riley in the photograph, though. Maybe noting that they bore something of a resemblance. 

“I do miss the wings,” Sam admitted. “I know you and Stark have your issues, but he did some good with those. I do not miss a lot of the shit that went with the army, but I miss the wings and I miss the…”

“Feeling that someone’s got your back,” Steve said, who was in fact currently resting his chin on Sam’s shoulderblade. “Feeling useful.”

“Hey, there’s other ways to be useful,” Sam said, twisting until he flipped over onto his back, looking up at Steve, who was sweaty and, by now, both disheveled and earnestly intent, at the same time. His hair was sticking up, and his expression had been open, daydreaming, but his eyebrows had slowly started to contract. 

“I’ve heard that before,” he said, quietly, and he did that collapsing-in-at-the-shoulders thing, kneeling next to Sam, that made him look so much smaller. “Look, don’t get me wrong, what you do is important, saving people, helping people? you still get to do that, but I can’t--”

_Aw, fuck_. “I’m sorry, man,” Sam said quietly, realizing that even after what has it been, Jesus, nine hours together, even after all kinds of physical intimacy, he was still on the level of calling Steve ‘man’. “I do not mean to preach. I am having a great time and maybe let’s just be here now, okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, but it was more quiet, remote. Well, that was how it went. Sam couldn’t count the number of times he’d abruptly shut down back when he had first come home. He had gotten pretty cold himself, he recalled. “Okay,” Steve said, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I, uh, I should probably get going. I don’t want to get caught staying over, I mean, you don’t need that kind of attention if--”

“I can take care of myself,” Sam said mildly. Okay. Maybe not mildly. Maybe he was doing ‘that passive aggressive thing’ Jeremy used to accuse him of, where he used his calm to disarm people, throw them off balance. Well, maybe he was a little offended. Sam sat back, one arm slung over his knee, and watched Steve swing his legs over the side of the bed, even that movement an amazing display of gathered, muscular grace; but something tentative and lost there, too, as if all he had was that body, like he felt he had to keep it braced against the world. 

“I know you can,” Steve said, turning, after he’d stepped into his boxers, to give Sam a brief, pale smile. “I’ll call or--text. Yeah. Text?”

“Right on,” Sam said, watching with no little regret as Steve pulled on his shirt. He walked Steve the door (they did kiss, but it was an aftertaste of everything else, the last perfunctory sip of a drink at a party) and watched with even more regret as he left.

______________________________________________

Steve got home to find soft music playing in his apartment.

And Nick Fury sitting up waiting for him like the dad in a sitcom.

Right after that first visual was when it stopped being funny.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot write sex for the life of me. I need a porn thesaurus or something before I try. But I will happily write about characters talking about sex. I also apologize for any mood whiplash contained herein. I feel like Steve has this habit of not really being great at talking about stuff. Like, he'll go along great with the banter for awhile and then just hit a wall and clam up.
> 
> Also, I fully realize that fandom interpretation of Steve's sexuality varies, but the whole premise of this fic is that he's got at least a little bit of game. So yes. I definitely think he'd watch porn. And, you know, he can't be a total innocent, given where he grew up and his experience in the army. He's probably more comfortable joking about sex than he is, say, talking about his actual feelings. (And re: the first line? 'Old-fashioned' idea totally came from someone's tumblr and if I could only find the post, I would give so much credit for that bit of slang).
> 
> P.P.S. I have written so many drafts and extra throwaway scenes for this fic, you guys have no idea. Next chapter should be along pretty shortly, as I have a bunch written.
> 
> Comments would be awesome. I really appreciate input--I love how vocal this fandom is on tumblr and want to include things you guys like.


	4. Better Come with a Parachute

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Steve POV**  
>  Deleted and altered scenes from _Captain America: Winter Soldier_ , some dialogue from the film (likely you can spot it, no infringement intended).

After the explosion, Steve had thought Natasha might be seriously hurt, but she snapped back fast enough to insist on driving them herself. It seemed to make her feel more comfortable to be the one at the wheel. 

“You’re sure you trust this guy?” she said, staring at the road straight ahead. Not bothering with eye contact, even though driving just below the speed limit--as they had to, to avoid the risk of detection--required little concentration.

 _Don’t trust anyone_. Fury’s last words. The things Steve was _sure_ of had narrowed down considerably in the recent past, but. “Look, if we don’t go to Sam, someone else could get to him first. They might have been watching me last night. Might know where he lives--”

She muttered something low, in Russian, her face set in the same neutral mask it always seemed to settle into. Pale, still smudged with the rubble of the explosion he’d carried her out of. “Considering _I_ thought I was your first kiss since ‘45, it’s probably safe to say they don’t know about last night either. You moved kind of fast there, didn’t you? And you’re sure that doesn’t indicate any compromised judgment at all.”

Steve set aside Natasha’s assumption that she kept better tabs on him than Hydra could for another time. That wasn’t the point right now. “So you agree. We should go. Hydra wasn’t watching, it’s safe. And it’s not like the guy doesn’t have any discretion, he was part of that EXO-7 experimental thing Stark ran. You ran the damn background check, don’t tell me you didn’t.” 

Natasha had seemed shaken in some profound way since Fury’s death. Her pauses, usually just long enough to make him uncomfortable, now trailed a beat longer. Which made Steve _very_ uncomfortable. She seemed marginally less self-contained than she had before, and even more cynical. He knew it was pushing things to bring it up, but... “Look,” Steve said, jaw tightening, “Fury trusted my judgment. He showed up at _my_ apartment.”

“And look how well that turned out.” Her lips barely moved on the words, and he felt a surge of guilt. 

He took a breath. “Natasha.”

Her eyes went wide and blank, and then she sighed, darting a brief look at him. “What the hell. Okay.” A tiny smile. “So the food trick worked.”

“How did you know--”

“Aha.”

_______________________________________

Sam’s expression, when he opened the door, changed very quickly from welcome to caution. His eyes went up and down Steve, then Natasha, taking in the damage.

“I’m sorry about this,” Steve said, the tendons in his neck going tight. In the background, faintly, he could hear the chirp of birds at a feeder, could smell the mix of sunshine and clean sweat, realized he was not making this man’s life any easier in _any_ way. “Sam, this is the only place I could think of to go.”

“Yeah, everyone we know is trying to kill us.” 

Natasha, at least, got to the heart of the issue. 

“Not everyone.” Sam reacted more perfectly than Steve could have expected. He could see the shift, too, the shift into heightened awareness, as imperceptible as ripples settling over a pond. He knew that look, the moment when jocularity fell away into seriousness of purpose. He knew it; he found it reassuring; he wished he didn’t have to see it on Sam.

Sam took a step back, ushering them in and then peering around the door frame before he pulled it closed. 

“Let me explain,” Natasha said abruptly, possibly because she noticed that Steve was still dumbstruck. “SHIELD is compromised. I’m talking from the ground up to who knows how high. All the way, now that Nicky Fury is” a less opaque person might have had to pause here, but Steve could detect not a flicker in her posture “gone.. I can think of some names…” Her mouth twisted. “We’ll work on that. Now, Steve says we can trust you, though I’m of the opinion that moving from a first date directly to ‘trust you with my life and the life of my friends’ is... precipitous. Impulsive.”

“Who, me?” Steve said.

“But honestly, Sam?” Natasha continued, ignoring him. “Right now I’d just appreciate a place to clean up and a cup of coffee.”

“Okay. Sure. Sure, right this way.”

They waited for Natasha in the kitchen. Steve tried his best to explain what had happened in the very long eighteen hours between the night before last and now, hoping his own anger and confusion didn’t color the facts too much. Sam made it easier (seemed to make everything easier), and even appeared to digest the revelation of a computerized Nazi scientist with equanimity.

“That’s some fucked up shit,” he said at last, whistling. (Okay, not complete equanimity).

“Seen a lot of that by now.” 

“You know how I said I had stories,” Sam started, reaching for a pair of coffee mugs in the cabinet. Put them down, and move to stand in the corner of the kitchen next to the refrigerator--a position that allowed him a view out the windows and a wall at his back. “Well, look, I’ve seen some shit, too. Been _in_ some shit. I don’t know if I mentioned what unit exactly Riley and I were a part of--”

“Pararescue, you said, with Stark’s wings.” Steve had found it poetic. The part of him that was still somehow prone to hero-worship, even now that he was supposed to be the hero, had found it just too easy to look at Sam as a kind of savior.

“Yeah.” Sam cleared his throat, stepped forward to press the coffeemaker’s button; stepped back into his corner. The last time Steve had seen that expression on his face was at the very end of the last night, when they had argued. “That was most of what we did. There was also some special ops stuff, mostly because Riley’d had pertinent experience. We ran into some… I think it was Hydra. What you’re describing, I think that’s it. In Afghanistan. They were doing some fucked-up experiments, and we couldn’t get any of them into custody because they’d bite down on some cyanide capsule, but one of them said the thing about the two heads and it--”

Steve froze. “Hydra?”

“I never heard them use that name. I figured it was another weird cult. But you’re saying….”

“Seems it’s a weird cult that’s infiltrated the U.S. government. SHIELD. Natasha says even the new director may be compromised. I think she knows someone we may be able to--”

She’d probably heard her name, because the water in the bathroom shut off and she leaned out, wrapped in a towel. “I’m using your hair straightener,” she said. “And yes. I have _some ideas_. The only question is how two wanted fugitives are going to get close enough to Jasper Sitwell.”

Sam blinked. “Uh, first of all, go ahead with that hair straightener. And… I can help with that second part.”

Steve’s arms folded themselves automatically across his chest, a defensive gesture or a belligerent one--he wasn’t sure. It knocked the wind out of him to hear someone else, _again_ , offer to follow him. “Sam, I can’t ask you to do this.” It came out sounding angry, though that hadn’t been his intention. “You got out for a good reason.” He almost said, please don’t. He’d come here, hadn’t he? What had he expected? _Impulsive_ , he thought.

“Yeah, I did,” Sam agreed. “But you didn’t ask, I offered. I got skin in this game too, Steve, I said I’d protect and serve my country. And if you’re wondering, no, I don’t decide to go into battle with you just ‘cause you’re a good kisser. I mean, you are, but it’s not about that.”

“Sam--”

“Got out for a good reason, getting back in for a good reason. Captain America needs me.” 

For a second, Steve felt like he had been punched in the gut ( _No, not Captain America… the little guy from Brooklyn_. Did he remember those words because they had truth to them? Should anyone want to follow Captain America? Was Natasha right and his judgment compromised, was this why the Army gave discharges for this sort of thing, and all of the train wreck of second thoughts he’d had too long to roll over in his head until they tumbled like polished rocks, worn too slippery to keep ahold of).

“So what’s the game plan?” Sam went on, taking a step closer to Steve and putting one hand on his arm just above the elbow, a gesture almost like someone taking the lead in a dance. Steve’s breath slowed. He hadn’t been aware it had sped up. 

“Great,” Natasha broke in. Steve had sort of stopped paying attention to her; she’d let herself fade into the background. Which was not easy for a woman who looked like she did wearing only a towel. “First, tell us where we can find the last pair of those wings you mentioned.”

“Ya know, I _really_ miss those. But I’m not sure it’s possible. The last one is at Fort Meade, behind three guarded gates and a steel wall.”

Steve exchanged a glance with Natasha. “Shouldn’t be a problem. But the damn things better come with a parachute.” 

“They come with a lot more than that.”

______________________________________

After Natasha kicked Sitwell off the roof, she turned to Steve. “Wonder why he has a hair straightener,” she mused. “Is he seeing someone else?”

“Sitwell?”

“No, Sam.”

“He said something about an ex who does drag, but I didn’t really wanna pry...”

“I can pry for you.”

“Think I’m okay, thanks.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why, yes, that was me foreshadowing secret Afghani Taliban HYDRA vampires.
> 
> Concrit--especially based on potential plot holes and characterization--welcome.
> 
> Sometime, I may try Natasha's POV, but for now I like leaving her inner workings a mystery, as they are to everyone around her.
> 
> Huge thanks to [mostfacinorous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mostfacinorous/pseuds/mostfacinorous) for the late-night beta-read.


	5. Icarus and Daedalus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skipping forward over most of the action in CA:TWS, simply because I felt it would be redundant. 
> 
>  
> 
> **Sam POV**
> 
>  
> 
> The Winter Soldier reminds Sam of his tours in Afghanistan. I explore some dark themes in this chapter, like using civilians as human shields (well, vampiric human shields, but in all seriousness, if that disturbs you, don't read). He deals with the fallout from the Hellicarrier crash and waits for Steve to recover in the hospital, fields calls from his friend-with-benefits Jeremy, then seeks out more information on the Winter Soldier from his friend Willow Rosenberg.

Sam had never seen a human move that way. Not even Steve Rogers, for all his clearly superhuman ability, carried himself with that ruthless, predatory precision. He had seen it before only with creatures who had once been human and had crossed over into something much darker. He thought he _had_ seen it before, when he'd been in Afghanistan during what they had called Operation Daedalus. They called them Hostiles, but they were, for all practical purposes, vampires.

At first he thought the metal-armed fighter, whom Steve said was Bucky Barnes, was one of those. He’d been out in the daylight, but maybe they’d changed things. Seventy years? He didn’t know much else that could survive seventy years.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership, and, he guessed, Hydra, had decided not to turn their own soldiers. Intelligence said they had a number a number of reasons for that, among them the logistics of containing the creatures code-named Hostiles. They couldn’t be disciplined well. Some reasons were hypocritical and arbitrary, like the Muslim prohibition against drinking blood, not that they followed anything but the most twisted echo of that religion. 

But mostly, it was a calculation designed to destroy morale on the ground.

What they did was simple, and, in a way, a logical extension of other tactics. It was also unspeakably evil. They made Hostiles out of Afghani civilians from different tribes, Buddhists, women, _children_. And out of Coalition soldiers, too, when they could. You learned real quick that your buddy… weren’t the same person anymore. Wasn’t a person at all. 

Seeing that had fucked Sam up in the head real good, partly because it wasn’t something he could talk about with most people, not even at the VA. He couldn’t talk about the way he sometimes woke up from nightmares where Riley came back and _he wasn’t Riley anymore_.

Sam knew it was ghoulish to be grateful for it, but sometimes he was. He was sometimes grateful that he had seen him die so definitively, so horribly (because what an RPG did to a man in a wing suit was as definitive as it got). And they’d said it, too, “If it comes down to it, you take me out.” 

If it came down to it, Sam had been pretty sure he couldn’t have. 

And this wasn’t the same, he knew that, but it was going to be difficult to set aside long experience and talk to Steve about his old friend. 

Natasha had explained that the Winter Soldier wasn’t one of those. How she knew about Operation Daedalus he wasn’t sure--never mind how she knew about the Winter Soldier. Steve was surprised, too. But she didn’t explain much further. She just said the Winter Soldier wasn’t a Hostile. She also said it might not make a difference. 

Frankly, a computerized Nazi scientist experimenting on some super-soldier who wore black and tried to kill you seemed just a little too familiar. If it was even a little like what Sam had seen, Steve wouldn’t be able to handle it. Sam thought it would break him. It was pretty obvious, no matter how cagey Steve had been, that he had loved Bucky Barnes in a way that didn’t wear off.

He had to say it, though, standing on the bridge. “I don’t think he’s the kind you save. I think he’s the kind you stop.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Steve said. 

_You can’t_.

______________________________

Steve was alive. Sam told himself that was the important part, though he didn’t want to imagine the kind of beating that would put Captain America in a hospital bed (he imagined it anyway). He’d spent the whole day either sitting at Steve’s bedside or fielding phone calls, trying to explain that he couldn’t talk in a military hospital, which only led to questions of “why are you in a military hospital.”

What felt like hundreds of phone calls, because even if no one knew he’d been directly involved, they knew he was in DC and they hadn’t been able to reach him since the day before. And those who really knew him recognized the wing suit on the news. He got calls and texts from relatives, friends, old friends, _friends_ of friends… he even got a call from StarkTech informing him that he was under investigation based on the theft of the EXO-7 wings. He said he knew nothing about it and hung up the phone. Strangely, no one from the government seemed interested in his testimony; someone must have pulled some strings to keep him a footnote, a media blip. Natasha, probably.

Jeremy called. With his usual odd combination of prurience and perspicacity, he said, “So you can’t talk. Okay. I’ll talk. So your hot-but-broody soldier boy was Captain _America_? Captain America is one of us, I’m not even surprised. You go with your bad self. I’m glad you’re alive, by the way. You’re done with the flying around saving people thing now, right? Tell me you’re done.”

“I told you I can’t talk.”

“No? Okay, no, you’re not done. At least it’s not the army again, now it’s full-on superheroics, at least you get to camp it _up_. Like shit, these guys don them some gay apparel. What do you say I make you a costume, like something with sequins, glitter, Kevlar. Like all the Kevlar. By the way, you’re okay, right?” His voice abruptly shifted from breathy to entirely serious.

Sam shook his head, dazed, then realized gestures did not translate over the phone. “I’m mostly okay. I may be here for awhile.”

“You need anything, you call me, babe. I’ll water your plants--”

“Don’t put too much on the African violet--”

“I would never. Love you.”

“You too.”

Natasha even called him from an untraceable number, which surprised Sam; he figured she’d have bigger things to deal with; he’d been keeping his eye on a play-by-play of the press conferences on his phone.

“You’re watching out for Rogers, aren’t you?” she said, with little preamble.

“Yeah.”

“He needs someone in his corner.”

“I promise you, I am there.”

“And you keep your promises?”

“Yeah, actually, I do.”

She sounded almost sad, though he had noted before that her voice lacked much inflection. He would call it flat affect in an assessment interview, but maybe super-spies were different from ordinary soldiers. “I haven’t met many people who can say that and mean it.”

“It’s not easy. You going to be all right?”

“I always am.”

“I bet that’s not easy, either,” Sam said. Because that just the kind of guy he was: he went fishing, trying to find the feelings behind what people said. Trying to find the person in there. 

She moved on abruptly; he could hear muffled noises on the other end of the line. “I have to go, but tell Steve… tell him I have something for him. I’ll let him know. When he wakes up, I’ll send time and place.”

“Is it… is it about the… guy?” He had to ask.

“Yes,” Natasha said. How’d she know--oh right. Spy. “It may be… there may have been some new developments.”

“Well, what is it?”

“What he is, is off the grid. Be careful, Wilson.” Funny, she’d called him Sam before. He guessed this meant she was being serious. “Stick by Steve. I’ll try to explain. Just tell him I wish I could be there, all right?”

“Will do.”

________________________________

Sam wanted to be there when Steve woke up. He knew from both direct and indirect experience that just after you woke up, when everything started to hit you, could be the hardest time. You were unguarded, and then all of a sudden the dammed-up rush of what you’d just been through roared down the pipeline and into your brain. Whatever painkillers they had Steve on might help, though he’d heard them talking about how he had some sort of tolerance to opioids. At first it had disturbed Sam, because he knew that effect only as a result of drug abuse. Then he realized it likely had something to do with the whole supersoldier thing.

“On your left.” Steve’s voice was raspy.

Sam looked up, measuring his expression, and decided that Steve would be all right.

Whether he’d still be all right when no one was watching, he couldn’t say.

_______________________________

The press disaster meant that Sam had to stay away from Steve for a couple of weeks after that. Steve was adamant about it. There was also the whole ‘your ex-boyfriend from seventy years is alive and a deadly assassin’ thing, so even their texts had become slightly more formal, though Steve let him know what was going on in broad strokes.

So he went back to his normal routine. Jeremy didn’t have to water his plants after all. He went running and stopped, reversed direction, and went home frustrated to watch more of the news and try not to throw things at his television. He went to work at the VA. He told his mom not to fly in because it was too dangerous in D.C. right now (unable to describe specifics), and she said, “I’ll give you dangerous, I’ve flown through worse,” and he said “All right, cool your jets.” She brought him a stew and made him eat more than he wanted to of it, like always.

He had to do something productive, so he got in touch with Willow. She said she had access to databases from something called Rising Tide, which had rudimentary information about the Winter Soldier. He read what he could get his hands on. 

What he learned was almost more frightening than what he already knew. No one else seemed to have any hint that the Winter Soldier had been James Barnes. What they did have was a chillingly detailed list of destruction pinned to his name. Some of it read like a tall tale; Sam knew a lot of this stuff online was junk. But if it was even half-true, and he’d seen stranger things….

Finally, _finally_ , the ruckus died down and he met Steve in what was possibly his least favorite place: the graveyard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at that, I actually updated. 
> 
> Little bit of mood whiplash going on in this fic, I know. But hey, at least it's finally a legitimate crossover.
> 
> It is, by the way, canon in the Avengers cartoon that Sam's mom brings cookies to the Avengers tower. Of course, that's a younger version of Sam, but how cute, right?
> 
> Oh, and look [here](http://samtalksfunny.tumblr.com/post/119129232053/supersoldiers-alcohol-and-drugs) for my discussion of how supersoldiers might respond to opioids and other painkillers.
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/samtalksfunny) and discuss crazy headcanons with me.
> 
> As always, comments are appreciated.


	6. What Ifs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam POV, then Steve POV at the end in a coda.  
> Cuts in just pre-AOU, with Sam and Steve learning that Baron von Strucker has something he's using to try to get his hands on the Winter Soldier.  
> Because they can't tell most of the Avengers about the Winter Soldier, they contact the Buffy gang via Willow Rosenberg for backup in Sokovia.  
> Sam's mom, a retired Air Force Major, flies them there in a plane.

Sam was starting to realize that Steve had some issues with owing people things. His knee-jerk response to any offer, from ‘Come stay at my place while we regroup,’ to ‘want a sandwich’ was met with ‘You don’t have to.’ Eventually Sam just started saying, “I know I don’t _have to_ , but…” in an increasingly pointed way, hoping annoyance alone would snap Steve out of it.

Because he was _in it_. In a funk, his jaw working like he had a tension headache. Did supersoldiers get tension headaches? The rest of time tired-looking, blank, and remote. He’d read over the files Natasha had given him obsessively, then graduated to what material Sam could show him from the Rising Tide server. Occasionally he got up and paced around Sam’s yard, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. 

Sam read the sections of the thick file Steve let him see. He had to turn on the part of him that simply analyzed things to do so: it was not an easy read. 

They had gotten some information out of it. Two days ago, they’d found the empty bank vault with the cryo chamber, prepared for the worst--carnage, bodies--but there was nothing there, just the empty tank, a bank of mostly smashed computers, and a sinister array of medical instruments. Steve had walked up to the tank and slammed his hand on it once, twice, so Sam was afraid he was going to try to punch through the glass. He couldn’t have, anyway; notes said it had been enhanced after an incident in ‘91. He was able to download some data from one of the intact computers with Natasha giving him instructions by phone, so they had that.

Later, they were able to view security footage from the vault on Sam’s computer. Among the images in the feed: a grainy picture of a figure in a hat pulled low, moving with sinister grace, who moved to put one hand against the glass of the cryo chamber, a preemptive echo of Steve. The figure stood there for a long time, then glanced up--a sudden jerk like a wild animal catching a shift in the wind--moved toward the screen. The video feed cut out. When it came back in, he was gone. The time stamp dated it at three weeks ago; the trail was cold.

_________________________________________

“So we’re going to Sokovia,” Sam said, while they sat at his kitchen table eating dinner. He’d thrown together a passable spaghetti bolognese, which Steve attacked as if it were a frustrating duty he had to complete. In other circumstances Sam might’ve felt a little insulted. As it was, he was just glad he was eating. Someone in his past must have nudged him to finish his food. Great Depression and all that, maybe it was his mother. Maybe, Sam thought, realizing it was kind of invasive that he had historical perspective on his friend but also aware there was nothing he could do about it--maybe it was Bucky Barnes.

“Right?” Sam prompted, looking at Steve, who stared down at the spaghetti sauce scrapings on his plate as if he were trying to divine something in their pattern. “That’s the plan? Because this Strucker seems to be pretty aggressively searching out the Winter Soldier. It could be a lead. And I’m telling you, Steve, this crew I said can help us… I trust them. Besides, we’re not making much headway here like this. Need a direction to go in.”

“He just _disappeared_ ,” Steve said, dropping his fork with a clunk. “Natasha said he could be in Europe, but she doesn’t know… what if he’s still here. Maybe I should stay.”

“You think he would what, come knock on the door? He barely recognized you, right?”

“I don’t understand why he’d pull me out of the river and then just leave.” Steve shook his head. “If Hydra has him again, I swear to God--” His voice went dangerous.

“If they do, we’ll go do some damage and get him out,” Sam said, after a minute in which he let Steve’s anger boil itself off. “But you know Natasha said it’s not likely.” What she had said, actually, was that the Winter Soldier, if he had broken through his programming, would be nearly impossible for anyone to get ahold of. “And Willow has some intel--” actually, not so much intel as future-predicting witchcraft, but hell if he was going to go into that just yet. “--from Sokovia that they don’t have him yet, but they have something that might help us _find_ him.” Willow had said something about an energy source, but couldn’t give him any more; it was vague, but Sam trusted her. “Anyway, we can’t cover all the ifs and maybes just yet. Take it one step at a time.”

Steve made a face. “Not my strong point.”

“I had noticed that.”

_____________________________________

“I should tell you a few things about my friends,” Sam said, after he and Steve had cleared their plates and gone outside to stand on his porch, watching hummingbirds flutter around the feeder. He was trying to enforce the ‘no looking at the files after mealtimes’ rule he’d set up, since Steve had almost thrown up after lunch. “They’re not exactly your typical military… they’re actually not even paramilitary. That’s why I thought of them; they’re so far off the grid, they won’t care about bringing in the Winter Soldier. You’re going to have to bear with me here, because it’s a little unbelievable.”

He explained.

Steve said, “Vampire slayers?” 

“And witches. And demons.”

Steve nodded. Said, “Okay.”

“You’re taking this pretty well.”

“Sam,” Steve said, “I’ve fought aliens alongside a Norse god and a man in a flying robot suit. This was after I went down fighting a guy with a red skull for a face and woke up seventy years in the future. Also,” he reflected, “I think I’ve run into vampires before.” 

“Wait, what?”

“This Hydra base in Hungary we thought was abandoned… wasn’t. They didn’t die until we took off their heads. Wooden stakes work, too?”

“Yeah, they… okay, that was not in the Smithsonian exhibit.”

“It was pretty highly classified. Even Peggy couldn’t believe it.”

“So you’re on board with this plan.”

“Vampire slayers, witches, demons, gods… I don’t care. I’m going to get Bucky back. I’d go to the Devil if I had to.”

He had never heard Steve like this before. Not posed with his chin up, like Captain America, like he had been making the speech to SHIELD. Instead: bleary and desperate, his mouth drawn down and his eyes red as he squinted into the sunset. 

“We can pack up and be ready to leave at 0600 tomorrow,” Sam said. Steve glanced at him, and Sam, knowing what he was going to say, recited the now-familiar chorus right along with him: “You don’t have to--” they both said, at the same time.

“Uh-huh,” Sam said, raising one eyebrow at Steve. To his surprise, Steve stepped in beside him and he felt the hard clasp of his hand, their palms pressed together, fingers interlocked. 

“Thank you,” Steve said. 

“Thank my mom, she’s gonna fly us over there.” Sam squeezed his hand in return; it felt like Steve didn’t want to let go. They stood there for awhile, watching the sky get dark. Then Sam carefully pulled free, touched Steve on the shoulder, and went inside.

_______________________________________

“We’re going to have to stop off in New York,” Steve told Sam as they made their way across the airfield to where Sam’s mother waited by the borrowed jet they had gotten via Colonel Rhodes. She couldn’t take her single-engine Cessna, not when they had Steve’s bike (rescued from the impound, no less) in tow.

A normal person would just push a motorcycle across the tarmac by its handlebars, but not Steve: he carried it on one shoulder, his duffel bag and shield looped over the other. “This is nothing,” he said, when Sam gave him a wide-eyed look, “I used to press it overhead with three USO girls on top.”

Funny how it was the little things about your superhero friend that impressed you. He’d seen Steve punch through walls, but the way he casually hoisted a Harley-Davidson made Sam do a doubletake.

He tried not to let his eyes linger on the way Steve’s shirt bunched under his arm, the intimate mark of sweat there. Because they were backed off, here, and it wasn’t the time. Steve hadn’t said it in so many words, but Sam knew it was because of the Winter Soldier--because of Bucky. “So, New York?” Sam said.

“Yeah, I got Stark on the phone at 0400--” And he actually smiled, apparently at the thought of bothering Tony Stark before it was light out. “--He said he’s finished that pair of wings for you.”

“Fuck, _yeah_!” He pumped his fist.

“Sam Wilson,” his mom said, standing in front of the jet with one hand on her hip. “You watch your mouth in front of Captain America.”

Steve and Sam exchanged a glance, during which Sam couldn’t help but remember exactly what his mouth had done in front of Captain America. He winced. Some things? His mom didn’t need to know. Steve busied himself putting down the motorcycle, shifting his things around, and when he came back he had on his Captain America face.

“Nice to meet you, Major Wilson,” Steve said, holding out a hand, apparently unruffled. Damn, could he turn on the charm. “You’ve raised a very fine son.”

_____________________________________

“Am I wrong here, or was Tony Stark being kind of a dick to you?” Sam asked, while they flew onward from Stark Tower across the Atlantic. Sam’s mother occasionally broke in over the intercom to tell them there was juice and sandwiches in the bar, but mostly left them alone, like it was one of the sleepovers Sam used to have as a kid. She was a quiet flyer, and knew he and Steve would want to talk. Sam watched the gray cityscape recede into the distance while the plane mounted past the first bank of clouds.

“Uh, he can be like that,” Steve said. He was sitting across from Sam with his shield planted between his feet, arms braced on the top of it, almost like it was a security blanket, a reassurance. Sam just hoped it wouldn’t take his head off if they crashed but Steve knew best, he supposed. Then he thought about the helicarrier and really wondered about that. “This time I think he was just curious what I’m up to, hates not knowing things. But yeah; he can be. He once said the best thing about me came out of a bottle.”

“Well, Jeremy did say that couldn’t be your natural hair color,” Sam said. “But heck, from what I hear about Stark, didn’t most of his early life decisions come from a bottle?”

Steve snorted, still a surprising sound coming from him, and tilted his head back against his seat. “I’m sorry he called you my sidekick.”

“I don’t mind being Captain America’s sidekick. Kind of a childhood dream and all that. But, technically, isn’t _he_ your sidekick? Aren’t you the fearless leader of the Avengers, now?” That had been what had gotten Tony pissed off, talking about Steve jetting off to who knew where when he’d bent over backwards putting together a team for him. That was when he’d made the ‘sidekick’ remark, and said something pointed about ‘not asking’; obviously he knew Sam’s record, so that stung. But he’d let it go. The man had made him a wing suit, after all, and he probably meant it well. Tony had publicly come out in favor of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell anyhow… but man, that wasn’t necessary.

“Technically, yes,” Steve admitted. He paused for a moment, thinking it over. “But you know what, sometimes I think people only put me in charge because I can’t follow orders to save my life.” Maybe _especially_ not then, Sam thought.

“It’s possible,” he said. “Be a hell of a headache being your CO; lucky I’m your _sidekick_.”

“You shoulda heard Phillips trying to deal with me,” Steve said. “Never mind Nick Fury.”

“I guess they couldn’t bust Captain America down a rank, though.”

“Yeah, could you imagine. Bucky always said--” He froze, cut himself off, and looked down at his shield, running a thumb over the top edge of the vibranium. An edge sharp enough to cut, Sam knew. 

“It’s okay, if you want to talk about him,” he said.

Steve shook his head. “No, I--it seems wrong. Is that crazy? Like I don’t even deserve to mention his name, until I can find him, make it right. He didn’t know his own _name_ , Sam. How can I sit here and tell stories about him, like they’re mine to tell, to make myself _feel better_ remembering.”

“Steve, it’s not your fault.” True, he’d rarely come across a situation this FUBAR, but he had had to say these words before. Had seen this kind of guilt, deep down guilt, the kind that wrecked people on their own inner rocks in stormy water. He had felt it. “You were frozen in ice, there’s nothing you could have done.”

“Yeah, and then I was busy working for a Hydra organization for two years,” Steve burst out. “I’m an idiot.”

“Steve, if even Nick Fury didn’t know, I mean I know the guy has one eye but I don’t get the feeling he usually misses much--”

“Peirce had him. He was _right there_.”

“I’m telling you, stop the what ifs. I know what that’s like, I’ve been there, but you can’t. Whatever state he’s in, at least he’s alive, right? We’re doing what we can.”

“Not yet.”

“We will be.”

They were silent, for a long time, while the miles dropped away under them and Steve stared out the window.

_____________________________

Steve looked down at the white clouds and the deep, faraway blue of the ocean. He had put a plane down over an ocean like this, he thought, after Bucky had died. _Hadn’t_ died. If he hadn’t done that, if he’d… if, if, if. If he had gotten himself out like Peggy said, saved himself and risked everyone else; if he’d gotten himself out and gone back to find Bucky. If he’d known he was still alive, he thought, he would have.

He wondered what Sam would say, if he told him that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Yep, now this is an Age of Ultron AU, too. I just cannot stop fixing the things I don't like in the MCU! Because, yes, I had some issues with AOU, so I decided that instead of what Joss Whedon actually contributed, I will pretend he contributed his Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters, instead. Also, now at least the 'language' line could make sense. We'll get to that, that scene is going to be very different.  
> -Now really and truly a crossover; I don't think you'll need to know much about Buffyverse, since I'll be kind of doing a grab-bag of what I consider canon from that 'verse (not overly familiar with seasons 8-10 but leveraging that info a bit, playing fast and loose).  
> -Sorry Natasha's off the map, I think canonically she's still dealing with her own stuff. She'll be back soon.  
> -And yes. We're back to some angst in here. I can't write non-angsty Steve; blame [my other fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3989410/chapters/8956966). (Which I guess is technically compliant with this one, though extremely different in tone).


	7. Outside In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve POV.
> 
> Mostly Xander-driven exposition leading to action in the next chapter.  
> We learn about Strucker, Sokovia, and maybe the Winter Soldier.

Steve knew it for what it was, when he saw it: a war zone, strewn with blown-out rubble, most of the houses half-collapsed. Certain stark signs of sudden shattering made a greater impression than just the twisted steel and strewn brick. Steve stepped over the cracked half of a bathtub in the street. He could smell the tang of bleach in the air.

The tallest building that still stood in the tiny once-a-town was an old Hotel International. Art Deco, incongruously Southwestern touches tacked onto the poured concrete. It struck Steve, he’d seen buildings like this in his real life. No. Wait. Before the war. All clumsy curled steel moldings and peeling pale pink paint. One corner had been gnawed away like a giant mouse had chewed it, which added to the sense of surreality about the place. A faded sign in Sokovian and English hung out front, letters gray as old newsprint against the fine scrolled molding. In English, it said, Welcome Traveler’s. 

“Let’s not let Natasha pick the hotel next time,” Sam said. 

He had put on his uniform, wing pack settled on his back. It relieved Steve to see him bulletproofed. His mother had, touchingly, tightened his buckles for him before she’d left, her brisk competence as she got him squared away a reminder of Steve’s own mother. And everyone else--he realized now that there had been several--who’d helped him put himself together.

Technically it was a no-fly zone, so Major Wilson had left soon after landing. StarkTech had furnished the plane with some useful extras. For example, they’d been able to scan the zone for heat signatures before they had touched down. Nothing, though they knew the hotel was shielded. Steve still couldn’t stop his eyes from automatically tracking the landscape, the skin on the back of his neck prickly and his focus sharp. He counted eight places where a sniper might be positioned before he made himself stop, and when he looked over at Sam he saw him doing the same thing.

Steve had exchanged his uniform for a plainer one. No stars, no stripes, just dark blue and heavily armored. He held his shield on one arm and had their bags slung over his motorcycle. 

The hotel door opened when they were still a good twenty yards away, and Steve tensed; relaxed at the sight of familiar red hair, but started again when he saw not one but two redheaded women. One of them Natasha and one, from a distance, close to a doppelgänger.

“You have interesting friends, Wilson,” said Natasha, her voice pitched just loud enough to carry the distance. The woman next to her blushed visibly.

“I’m Willow,” she said, and now that he looked at her he saw immediate differences: her face quirky, mobile, and sensitive where Natasha’s stayed fixed. Her movements untutored. “Rosenberg. And you’re Captain America, I mean, Steve Rogers, I’ve heard so much--”

“All good, don’t worry,” said Sam, and Steve held his breath for a moment and let it out.

“--and not just from the comics. I’m sure you get that a lot, right? You get that a lot. Anyway, uh… hi, Sam.”

“Hey, Will.”

“Come on,” Natasha said, beckoning them inside, her eyes caught steady on Steve. “Inside.”

Inside, the building looked no less efficient and busy than the interior of SHIELD, though its outside couldn’t have been further from the Triskelion’s pristinely lidless glass. The people here dressed casually; there wasn’t exactly a military air. More like an office, one of the ones Steve had seen on TV shows about modern young professionals who wore unbuttoned shirts and jeans while they did harried, important things and shouted into their phones a lot. Here were banks of computers, yes, but there was also a corner full of esoteric devices, metal, stone, wood; heavily leather-bound books; and what Steve could swear was a set of crystal balls. Did they come in sets? 

Also, what he thought was just a guy in a flannel t-shirt turned around and… he had horns and a wrinkled face like a reptile. Not the strangest thing Steve had seen, after the Chitauri, but jarring. “Hey, there,” the lizard-faced man said in a disarmingly casual tone, nodding and sipping at a cup of coffee. Steve inclined his head warily in return.

They met the man in charge, a lanky, not at all reptilian, dark-haired guy with an eyepatch. He introduced himself as Commander Harris but immediately relaxed after his salute in a relieved kind of bonelessness, and told them to call him Xander.

He said to Steve, "It’s an honor. I have almost all your--"

"... trading cards?" Steve suggested, trying not to sound weary.

“How’d you know?” Turning to Willow. “How did he know?”

“Lucky guess,” Steve said.

“Well, that’s not important,” Xander said, waving it off. “I guess it’s also not the time to tell you what a big fan I was of Nick Fury, for obvious reasons,” pointing to his patch. “Not just that. What I mean is I was really sorry to hear about that.”

“It’s all right.” If Natasha hadn’t told him, neither would Steve. 

“We’ll debrief later,” Xander said. “Get settled first. Tell me if there’s anything you need. Food? We have many kinds of food.”

“We’ll let you know,” Sam assured him, glancing at Steve, who shook his head: he’d eaten about eleven sandwiches on the plane, just to avoid having to talk too much.

Willow showed them to the armory, where Sam deposited his wings. Steve stowed his Harley in the big, reinforced concrete garage underground, next to a fleet of old Sokovian Humvees, a tank, and, to his surprise, another motorcycle with an American license. Xander informed them that this had been part of a rebel base before they’d moved in. To explain the motorcycle, he sighed and said, “Spike. Don’t ask.”

Willow and Xander left them alone to settle into their rooms, which were next to Natasha’s. Just narrow hotel rooms, with dilapidated furnishings and rickety beds. Papered over in dusty green. A big brass lamp askew in one corner, an old radiator covered in peeling paint. Sam and Steve dumped their things and then stood in the hall, in the small space between their doors, while Steve tried to absorb everything he’d just seen.

“Retro,” Sam commented at last. He leaned one hand against the doorframe, scanning his room again in the switched-on way Steve noticed he had sometimes. He had a heightened awareness that somehow translated as just another level of his usual calm. But that wasn’t really fair, was it? Steve supposed he looked calm from the outside, too.

“Familiar,” Steve said, with a tired smile that felt false on his face. “Art deco was in, back in the day.”

“All good?” Sam said. “I know this is strange.”

“Like I said… what’s strange anymore?”

“Well, it’s a little weird for me,” Sam admitted, and Steve looked harder at him, shifted so he was leaning sideways against the wall, too, to face Sam. “Not just this place, though I’ve never really met all of Riley’s… friends. I’d just kept in touch with Willow. Whew.” Blew out his breath. “They’re quite an outfit, huh?”

“Definitely different,” Steve said, trying diplomacy. “Not like SHIELD.”

“Yeah, and maybe that’s the good part,” Sam said, nodding. He paused. “But it is… seeing the street like that. That smell. Someone set off a dirty bomb. I didn’t think I was going to smell that again.”

“Are _you_ all right?” Steve didn’t really know what to do with himself, wound up bunched up against the doorframe, arms crossed.

“Oh, man, sure, of course.” Sam had the capacity to almost-smile in a way Steve had to file away in his head as something to draw someday. Not that he ought to be thinking about that. “I was just thinking, I’m glad I can still help.” 

Steve believed him. He realized what a relief it was to be around someone he could believe like that.

___________________________________________

Steve, Sam, Natasha, and Willow followed Xander to a conference room, the table laden with books--funny, Steve had gotten so used to the streamlined holographic displays at SHIELD that books struck even him as quaint. They did have one of those displays, though, an older-generation holograph that popped up to show a map of the region.

Natasha sat with lips tight and arms folded in her chair, expression blank. Steve had a feeling she was looking at Xander that way on purpose, simply for amusement. Willow, next to her, kept shooting her nervous glances.

“What’s going on out there?” Steve asked, bluntly, as soon as the door had shut behind them. “I knew there was unrest in Sokovia, but…”

Sam added, “Out there? That’s not just unrest.”

“It’s not just the Sokovian government,” Natasha said, shrugging; Xander had been about to say something but he shut his mouth abruptly when she spoke. “Strucker’s been using the rebellions as leverage. This town became a rallying point for the rebels, and then, when they heard the government planned a strike, an example. Citizenry blew it up themselves, ambushed the police detachment. Of course it escalated.”

“And Strucker swept in with whatever new weapon he was testing to, quote unquote, save the day,” Xander said. “That time it was a fire demon. We took care of it when your SHIELD forces couldn’t.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Willow give a tiny, satisfied smile.

“So Strucker’s been causing a lot of trouble, but for awhile, we could handle the occult side of things,” Xander went on. “Then it turned out SHIELD doesn’t just have it in for us because we’re weird and demonic and they’re the big bad government, they have it in for us because they’re weird and bad _and_ demonic and uh… anyway, Strucker’s kind of just been gathering steam since SHIELD went kaboom.”

“What kind of firepower does he have?” Steve asked.

“At least twelve hundred stationed there, but that’s the least of it. It’s the research lab. He’s been churning out some strange stuff, not just occult, tech too. Kinda in line with the grand old Nazi tradition of horribleness, he’s been going after human experimental subjects. We’re not fans of that. Been doing our best to stop it.”

Steve’s stomach plummeted into icy freefall. Human experiments, he thought. Again. “And you think he’s after the Winter Soldier, too?” was all he said, trying not to sound too desperate.

“Yeah, or the Winter Soldier is after him… or after something he has. We honestly didn’t even know the guy existed until Willow dug up the info and that’s pretty spare.. But yeah, he may be what Strucker’s men are looking for right now,” Xander said, running one hand distractedly through his hair. “We overheard chatter about an infiltration on their comms yesterday. Someone scaled the wall of the castle, took out fourteen of their men, and left.”

“Just fourteen,” mused Natasha.

“Strucker was pretty shaken up about it,” Xander went on. “He sent a detachment out looking for the guy. The Soldier. He’s brought out the big guns for this one, something powerful. We think some of the experiments have started to, uh, maybe kind of work. So we sent our best out after them, mostly slayers. Like, right now, Buffy’s group should be almost on them--” His eye darted to the projection screen. “Can I just say how unfair it is that we finally installed 3-D capacity holograms and I have no depth perception? Can I say that? How did Nick Fury deal with this?”

Willow cleared her throat.

“Anyway,” Xander went on, “We’re getting some pretty weird reads where Strucker’s search party went. There’s a whole area, look, where it’s just like even the satellites won’t track it… we can’t seem to get a handle on anything there, it’s like trying to pop soap bubbles with a nerf gun.”

Steve thought, _what?_ This level of modern slang was too much for him. A sidelong glance at Sam, met with a shrug, told him maybe Sam was in over his head there, too.

Willow said, “There are tremendously anomalous energy signatures, _and_ whatever's shielding them is impermeable to most magic. It appears to be something both technologically sophisticated and occult.”

A square on the grid was lit up and flashing yellow. It had been since they’d walked into the room, actually, a steady flicker Steve had noted and then dismissed. 

Now the flashing yellow turned to orange, and then deep red.

“Uh-oh,” Xander said. He’d seemed relaxed, but now he tensed, his jocular, casual air slowly hardening. His posture improved. Steve saw something of the soldier in him, then. “Willow, what’s going on?”

When Steve turned in his chair, he found Willow’s face had gone very set. Veins stood out in her forehead, and her eyes--they had become pools of black. _All right_ , he told himself, _So that’s what it looks like._ Even Natasha seemed surprised. 

“Trouble,” Willow said, in a whisper that filled the room. “There is. Something new.” She pointed to a spot on the map at the edge of the flashing zone. “I’d better go.” Her blank, black gaze turned on the rest of them like the glare of some predatory bird, and then she shook herself, and the black drained from her eyes like ink out of a well. 

Steve stared. “What’s going on?”

“There’s been an ambush,” Willow said. “The riverbed our group went down to investigate… they’re fighting now.” 

“That’s ten klicks out,” said Xander, reaching for the headset on the table. “Summers, do you read? Summers, come in--”

“You need help?” Sam asked.

“I’m in,” Steve said, standing, grabbing for his shield.

“Of course,” said Natasha, unfolding herself with liquid grace. Steve couldn’t tell if she were talking to him or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -I really hope I haven't lost anyone with the Buffyverse here! I just think it's fun that Xander is canonically a fan of Nick Fury and that he learned his soldierly skills from a magic spell cast upon him while he was in a Halloween costume. I mean, on some level--if Steve knew that--he'd relate.  
> -The smell of chlorine comes from a homemade dirty bomb. Hence Steve and Sam's comments.  
> -The next chapter is going to be pretty action-packed and include a healthy dose of intense Sam angst, plus Natasha POV, so stick with me here, OK?


End file.
